The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)

Above all, if he wanted to get anywhere, he had to reject the notion of any possible guilt right from the start.

“I find it odd,” said Fräulein Bürstner, “to be forced to forbid you to do something your own conscience should forbid, namely, to enter my room when I’m away.”

I’m always involved in my work, and so I have my wits about me; it would be a positive pleasure to confront a situation like this at my office.

The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”

If he stayed home and led his normal life he was infinitely superior to any of these people, and could kick any one of them out of his path.

“No,” said the priest, “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” “A depressing opinion,” said K. “Lies are made into a universal system.”

Committing suicide would be so irrational that even had he wished to, the irrationality of the act would have prevented him.

One needn’t be particularly faint of heart to be easily persuaded of the impossibility of ever finishing the petition. Not because of laziness or deceit, the only things that kept the lawyer from finishing, but because without knowing the nature of the charge and all its possible ramifications, his entire life, down to the smallest actions and even

Then he went up the first set of stairs after all, his mind playing with the memory of the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it actually followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.